TRANSCRIPT
NB. Let’s look at our question then: Is God really listening now? That assume, that’s got some assumptions, of course; purposely, that’s why I posed it. But it assumes the existence of God. Karl Marx saw religion as as a pacifying opiate of a masses, a means of control; Sigmund Freud saw God as a wish fulfillment; Dawkins, Richard Dawkins famously sees God as a delusion. What evidence can you offer those people who might think that Dawkins, Marx, Freud and other thinkers have got a point? What evidence can you offer that God really does exist?

RW. The first thing to say is of course that the existence of God just isn’t something you can give a cast iron proof for in the way that you might prove, I don’t know, the existence of electrons – or the existence of some unimaginably obscure and remote animal or insect species, because God isn’t an item inside the world that you can go looking for; you have to step back a bit and say, “So what exactly are we trying to say?” and what the religious believers says is that behind every action, every transaction and exchange of energy, every event in the world, there is something that is unconditionally active. Nothing made it to be active; it’s not reacting to anything; it’s simply there and all action is stimulated by that and oddly enough modern science allows us a bit more leeway there than some older kinds of science might have done. If you just think the world is a great heap of stuff flying around, then you might well say, “Okay perhaps the stuff was always lying around; if you see the world as a great interchange of energy, if you see it as an exchange of information constantly buzzing and sparking between different bits of hugely unimaginably, complex reality, then the question of “well, where does all that energy find its root, its impulse?” – that makes a bit of sense. I don’t think there’s a cast iron argument there, but that’s one way I’d introduce the idea, reminding people of what often somebody like Richard Dawkins doesn’t seem to remember, which is that we’re not talking about a God who is just one more thing among others, a rather unusual member of the universe.

Second thing I just want to say very briefly is I’d want to put Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Dawkins, all the others, put their work alongside what it is that Christians over the centuries have actually said about God, and say, “Well, when you’ve mapped let’s say Karl Marx onto that, it covers a very small territory of what Christians actually say, and there’s all the rest of it. And then Freud covers another little bit of the territory and Dawkins another little bit of the territory, but none of them quite seems to get the whole thing.

If religion is just something we’ve invented to keep us cheerful, why is it that religious practice is so deeply demanding? Why do people risk their lives for it? If religion is just a consolation for the fact of our death, why is it that religious faith so often tells us it matters intensely how we react to one another into our world here, . .and day by day and so on. So you can throw all sorts of reproaches at the language of faith, but none of them quite seem to cover the whole territory. There’s always something that escapes.

NB. It’s always easier to be against something, than to be for something, isn’t it? And there are some easy targets. Yes and certainly the God delusion book by Dawkins does actually pick on easy targets, and many right-minded, fair-minded people will say, “Oh he’s got a point there.” because it shouldn’t happen like that, but being against something isn’t the same as offering, as you are suggesting, a comprehensive alternative narrative that deals with the deeper issues of human personality and destiny.

RW. Yes that’s right ,and I think that’s also why relatively few people accept Christian faith or any religious faith because they’ve been argued into it. They see lives that appear to work. They see lives that hang together and have a bit of sense of meaning to them and they think, “I wouldn’t mind living in that kind of world that that person seems to occupy. I wonder what it’s like?” And it’s not a short task. You can’t say, “All right. I’ll deal with that in a quick course of six seminars.” You can say, “Well, hang around. See what you pick up. Take some risks. Open your imagination a bit.” And you never quite know what will happen. C.S Lewis, probably the greatest Christian apologist of the 20th century, famously and rather daringly said. “God is really unscrupulous. Give him an inch and he’ll take a mile.” If you open even the smallest door, you never quite know how much he’s going to push himself through.

REFLECT

Above we have Archbishop Williams answer to the question, “What makes a person what to be a Christian? ”  He says that

It happens
when
one sees
a person
whose life appears to work.

It happens
when
one sees
lives that hang together
and have a sense of meaning.

And they want that, too.
“I wouldn’t mind living in that kind of world that that person seems to occupy. I wonder what it’s like?”

So what each of us has to do
is turn to God
and ask God to help us live such a life
and ask each other to help us live such a life.

Then our work, our joyful work, with God and with each other begins:
Day by day, year after year,
we hang around Jesus.
talk to Him, listen to Him.
See what we pick up.
Take some risks.
Open our imaginations a bit.

SUGGESTION: Write a daily prayer committing yourself to do that and pray it at the beginning of each day. Then, at the end of the day, review your day in the presence of God and compare the day’s opportunities. How did it go? Where did you excel and where could you have done better?

Sister Loretta